EXPERIMANTAL BLOGGING

As you can see I have just had a go at inserting a slideshow and I thought I would sum up the year of the vine in a slideshow. The Vignerons (wine makers) are out in the vineyards at the moment and it is around - 4 degrees (South of France remember!) pruning the vines. Some use hand pruners, just like you would prune your roses with, and others use battery powered trimmers which are much quicker and very expensive. It looks as though it is a very very lonely and cold job, not to mention back breaking. We went for a walk yesterday with our walking group, I dont like to call them the Troisieme Age because they are all a lot fitter than me, but we were out in the cold walking through vineyards and villages and we saw the grapes being trimmed. Strangely there only ever seems to be one poor lonely soul per field and they are BIG fields. We also saw vineyards which only grow the Muscat grape which is very popular in this part of the world. The Muscat does not like a lot of water so they ground up stone and use it as a mulch around the plants, in fact all over the field and it looks just like snow.